2011 English for Writing Research Papers

190 12 Abstractswill explore the relationship between factors such as the duration of the PhD programme,the availability of a scholarship or background experience in the field and PhD students’criteria for choosing the specific issue that they wish to study. Initial results from the first20 surveys seem to indicate the importance of the availability of funding and the potentialjob prospects rather than preferences driven by pure interest for its own sake. We hope toshed light on the way scientific knowledge is crafted and about challenges and limitationsyoung researchers face during this process.The abstract now contains the words currently, will explore, seem to indicate, andwe hope, all of which highlight that this is ongoing research. By adding some ofthe initial results, the audience at the conference will be interested to know whetherthese results were confirmed when the whole battery of surveys was analyzed.Your abstract should encourage conference attendees to come and hear you ratherthan going to a parallel session. If you don’t have any results at all, you shouldeither consider going to a later conference when you have something more conclusiveto say, or tell readers what you expect your results to show.12.14 How should I select my key words?How often should I repeat them?There is a lot of mystery around how Google and other search engines use keywords when indexing websites and articles. In any case it makes sense to have keywords in your abstract (and title too) because it forces you, the author, to decidewhat words in your paper really are important. The key words are also the wordsthat readers are looking for in their initial search and then when they actually scanyour abstract. General consensus seems to be to not repeat the key words more thanthree times in the abstract. This can be tedious for the reader. More importantly,‘keyword spamming’ may lead to the web page being rejected by the searchengine.Some journals require you to have a list of four or five key words directly underyour abstract. The same journals may also require that the keywords in this listshould not appear in the text of the abstract.Make sure you have a very clear idea of the policy regarding key words of thejournal or conference before submitting your abstract.12.15 Should I mention any limitations in my research?You should certainly mention the limitations of your research at some point in thepaper. However, given that an Abstract is designed to ‘sell’ your research, youmight decide not to mention the limitations until the Discussion (Sect. 17.11).